4 down 8 to go!


Oh my oh my goodness where did April go!? To start with, I would like to wish my parents a very happy 30th wedding anniversary! They are celebrating in Aruba (without me) and I am so proud to say that they have stuck it out for 30 years. Through everything they have been through, they are in inspiration to me. They never gave up and they always fought through the ups and downs.

So April is almost over and I've done a few new things this month. I attended a marriage conference (even though I'm not married) and we learned some tips and tricks to hopefully help have a great marriage if that ever happens for me! I led the Sr. Highers on a Reverse Photo Captioned Scavenger Hunt, which was epically awesome. My favorite photo? This one:

Yep that's right. One of my kids doing a back flip off of my car, over another kid,while the girls looked on holding their breath. Fear not, he practiced before hand so we knew exactly where the kid on the ground would have to be in order to not get hurt. The Caption they had to adhere to in this one was : "All the onlookers could tell how this one was going to end"   The kids had a blast and when we were done, we went back to church for a pizza party. Great night.

JD and I also took Skidamirink hiking! She's been asking for a while now to go camping (something she has never done) but the weather has not been in our favor on that one. Although we did pick her up a PINK (gross) Princess sleeping bag this week so we are ready to go. We are hoping to go in May sometime. Instead of freezing our dupa's odd camping, we decided to take a day trip and go hiking with her. She was so excited, and we were not even 5 feet into the trail when she started saying "oh my gosh! Mom! This is so cool!" :) She did great. We stopped at Subway on the way up and had a picnic on a rock overlooking the river. Beautiful.

That's where we ate. She loved looking at the river. The whole time we were walking I kept repeating to her, "watch you feet. Always look where you are going to step" she insisted on taking the hard way on every path and up every rock. Totally Fearless and adorable. After a while as she climbed I could hear her saying "I watch my feet, always watch my feet." It was priceless. 

I watch my feet

We had a great time all day. We stayed and hiked for a couple of hours, and ended up leaving just in time as it started raining. We packed the day pack with lunch, snacks and water, a fist aid kit (just in case) and of course the camera. The first aid kit ended up being very helpful, as Athia for some odd and inexplicable reason, touched dog poop, so we were able to sanitize her hands right away (ew). After we got done, she looked and me and said "Mom! Why would I touch that poop?!" I answered "I have no idea...why did you?" Her response? "I don't know..that just gross" ahahahaha Hopefully that will be the last god poop touching incident we have to deal with.

What about anyone else? Any good hiking or camping tricks you want to share when it comes to bringing toddlers along? I'm nervous about taking her camping, mainly because I haven't been in over 10 years. So tips and tricks are welcomed!

Easter is a Lovely Time!

Greetings and salutations!

  Life has been a whirl-wind! Between work, school, skidamirink, JD, and the rest of life I hardly know what day it is at this point! This past weekend, however was Easter weekend. It was a blast. Despite the ever looming deadline of my prospectus presentation that was due yesterday (Monday) I managed to take the weekend and have some needs time with my family. We decided to have a family Easter dinner on Saturday with my family and then we went to Easter lunch at JD's grandparents (who are so adorable I can only hope to be in love like they are when I am their age!)
 
   I found myself wondering on Thursday what exactly I could do to decorate for Easter on Saturday. I had purchased an adorable EASTER wood carving thing on sale at Walgreens:

So that was cute and all, but I felt it needed something more. Being the Pinterest addict that I am I decided to do some looking and found the perfect craft! Neglecting my homework in the name of arts-and-crafts-bonding with skidamirink we went to Michaels and bought lots of colors of embroidery floss and a few packages of balloons. We made our own Easter egg decorations! How you ask? The inspiration came from Crafty Endeavor and immediately caught my eye. It was a titch more messy than I thought it would be (skidamirink actually wouldn't touch it because she didn't like the way the liquid starch felt) but it was initially easy and fun! 

So obviously balloons were the first place to start. The original blog said to use water balloons because of the smaller size and I should have listened. I used regular balloons and blew them up smaller but they were still a little big in the end to work with. I made the liquid starch with corn starch an water which proved a little more difficult to do than I thought. In fact I am still not sure that I did it quite right but it all worked out in the end. I wish I could give you the recipe for it, but I pretty much improvised so I'm not sure what I did! I let it cool and filled pie pans with the liquid starch.

I picked the pie pans because you have to wrap the floss in a circle around and I figured that the pie pan would work bestt as it is not too deep or too large. It worked great. 

From here we (JD did a whole 2 for me...thanks dear) wrapped the floss around the balloons however we wanted! The idea is that you then leave them to dry, pop the balloons and have beautiful eggs to make an Easter garland or however else you chose to display them. 

Once they were wrapped we let them dry.

Now I don't have pictures of the next part because I was alone and a little frustrated. After I popped the balloons the next night, I was surprised to find that the balloons did not deflate. The blog I was following said nothing about this, so I am wondering if this is because I may not have done the liquid starch exactly right, but I do not know. So...I popped the balloon and nothing happened. I laughed a lot while attempting to pry the balloons away from the hardened floss mainly so that I wouldn't cry do to stress and lack of sleep (it took over 1.5 hours to get all the balloons out of the hardened eggs, which as far as I can tell is not typical).  I worked and worked and finally......

Success!!! Now they were a little misshapen due to all the prying to get the balloons out, but they were incredible easy to re-shape so that was a blessing. I then took a thin metal stick we use to test if cakes and what not are done and I used that to scrape off the dried liquid starch that was left on the eggs. Then we hung them up! 

I then took the bags of starburst jelly beans I bought, and the Gerber Daisies and made a centerpiece: 

Easter dinner consisted of bacon wrapped pork loin, bacon wrapped sweet potatoes, a green bean feta salad, cheddar filled corn meal biscuits (all thanks to Kraft.com) and my sister made her cheesy hashbrown potato thingy that I don't eat. Over all it was a very successful Easter and I am so glad I got to spend it with family. 

On a side note, literally while I was typing this and skidamirink was playing with magnets in the kitchen (or so I thought) I noticed she got too quite (parents you know what I mean). So I asked her what she was doing and when her response was "I don't know" I knew I was in trouble. That being said, my beautiful girl with long (almost to her waist) curly hair....

This was Sunday

She is now my beautiful girl with incredible short hair....

I have cried for over an hour now....and I know it's just hair...but I can't help it. She keeps telling me that "it's ok mom, I'm still a princess" but it is so different! I know it'll grow back, but she looks like a new person and I can't get past it yet. I'm sure by tomorrow I'll be better but I'm pretty traumatized at this point. I was bawling in Great Clips trying to ask them to fix it,  fortunately for me I'm not the first mom to have this experience, and so when I asked "can you fi..." and started sobbing, they knew what I needed. The stylist was great and helped calm skidamirink too who kept telling me "I don't want to be a boy!" and now she keeps telling me how pretty she is. So I'm sad this is how her first true haircut had to come about, but I guess it could always be worse. 

What about you? Any awesome kid-cutting-hair stories to share? 

Lacking Motivation

Disclaimer: There will be a lack of photos in this post!

We are experiencing an early spring/summer here. The weather had been in the 80's over the weekend! 80's in March! According to the news we are shattering records! hooray! :) Not about the record...I could care less about that. But the weather! The beautiful wonderful, lets-spend-loads-of-time-outside weather! I can't get enough of it! Skid can't either! She is loving it. The park, the walks, the trampoline (until it broke on Saturday!) So what, you may ask, am I lacking motivation in? Homework....housework....yard work....and work work! (notice the trend?) All I want to do it enjoy the weather. To sit outside and soak it all up with toy cars and chalk and bubbles! Skidamirink makes me feel 5 again :)

I have a ton of homework to do. That's a main starting point. I'm staying mostly on top of house work, but I know there is some more spring cleaning that could be getting done. On the plus side, I'm only about 3 days behind on my Bible reading! Hooray progress! Of for those of you who don't know; I joined Toastmasters International. Toastmasters? What the heck is that?! Well I'll tell you. It's basically a club that helps you develop and work on your public speaking and leadership skills. I'm actually pretty excited about this. I didn't count it as a "new" thing for blogging purposes, as I can't really document it via photos, but nevertheless, I've joined the club and I'm going to be giving my first speech in a few weeks! ahh! The first one is just an ice breaker speech, basically letting the people in the club get to know you a bit. We'll see how it goes. It's only 4-6 minutes long, but we all know that can seem like an eternity when up in front of people!

This past weekend was amazing. St. Patricks Day was a success! I had a Sr. High Youth Group party complete with clothing exchange and the breaking of my trampoline. Good thing Skid is so cute, because by the next day she had already convinced Grandpa to buy her a new one! Yay Grandpa! (softy! haha) The girls had fun and so did I. It's nice to be able to get to know them outside of the church.

I made them a dessert off of Pinterest :) It was delicious. It's called Pattys Pudding and you can get the recipe by clicking on the link. It's fast and simple and very yummy. I did use the mint green Oreos instead of the regular ones though, just for fun and added taste.

Later that night JD's brother and family came over for a BBQ. We made Hawaiian Chicken sandwiches which were great. Add a spinach and strawberry salad with raisins and a Very Berry Vinaigrette, a Suddenly Salad, some chocolate mint dip-n-dots and we had a great time! We even had a bonfire  and stayed up "late" playing tag and flashlight hide-and-go-seek with the kiddos! Skid loved it! She doesn't get to play games like that a lot considering she's an only child of a single mom!  Overall the weekend was a huge success! Which brings me back to the point that I am seriously lacking motivation in getting "work" done!

That being said JD and I have signed up to do a Warrior Dash! We are headed to out of state for it, as the one here conflicted for us. We are attempting to become St. Jude Warriors too, so if you want to help by donating, follow the link! Your support is much appreciated, that children and I thank you. :) Anything you can donate will help, and it all goes to St. Jude Children Research Hospital. Basically (check out the link above) we are going to be running a 5k from hell. Running through fire, over cargo net walls, crawling through the mud under barbed wire....good stuff. BUT for a good cause. And as we've learned, I'm a sucker for a good cause ;) So we are getting ready for that. I've upped my daily walking to start, started doing yoga and plan to re-integrate pilates into my routine for strength training as well. I know that eventually I will have to start actually dying RUNNING, and any advice would be much appreciated. I HATE  (we don't say hate, Mom!) DISTAIN running! I tried the couch potato to 5k and didn't care for it, so any other suggestions would be most welcomed! How did you start running? What works, what doesn't? How do you deal with shin splints (cuz I always get them then I decide to start running, it's a major contributing factor in me stopping every time I start)? I have 4ish months to get ready for this thing. My goal, to be honest, is to finish and finish strong (and not in last place). I don't want to win I just want to rock it! So I know I need to start something. . . Thanks for your input!

LETS DO THIS!

3 Down 9 to Go!

What a busy March!!! And it's only the 13th! My goodness time is flying by and to top it all off it was over 60 degrees today and only supposed to get warmer all week! Bring on the sunshine! So to start off with, reading the Bible has been going pretty well. Jim and I are both a little behind, but we're working on it :) I'm still enjoying the Old Testament, even though it is a little dry in places, but it's interesting to finally be reading for myself some of the stories and learning how things tie together. Dinner making has been pretty good too, tonight was spaghetti and homemade garlic and mozzarella cheese bread :) so delicious! We kept it simple so we could get outside to enjoy the sunshine! We even had time to make it to the park and play!

So my "new" thing for March came about through a work friend. She approached me one day and asked if I would like to join her team....her Polar Plunge Team. Now my first reaction was something along the the lines of "are you crazy in the head!? Jump into freezing water in the beginning of March, in Minnesota?!" No thank you, I choose life! But then she asked me the question....."have you ever done it before?" *sigh* No, no I had not and as fast and I had said "no" I switched my answer to a "yes". After all, I needed to try one new thing a month, and not only would it be a neat experience, I would be helping raise money for the Special Olympics of Minnesota at the same time. I'm a sucker for a good cause. :) So I signed up and started raising money! At one point I got an email that they were adding a Pee Wee Plunge for children under 12. Say no more, I signed skidamirink up! She raised over $250 (and got a shirt and a hat both of which she was stoked about) and she got to jump into a pool of cold water (about waist deep). She loved it. The work people and I decided to let our department choose our costumes via a fundraiser and we ended up dressing up like super heros! Hooray!

So the week of the plunge, we are all excited. The weather had been great, it had been an incredible mild winter and the weekend forecast was looking good. A little chilly but not too bad.Well we woke up Saturday morning to snow and wind! Not the combination we were looking for while standing on a frozen lake in relatively little clothing! (at least Skidamirink got to jump into the water in a heated tent!) So we got there and were waiting our turn, getting dressed and what not. Skidamirink wanted to pose as a super hero and everyone there was loving the smallest member of the Westside Wipe Outs!

So here we are fully decked out as super heros. We made our capes the night before. I bought cheap white curtains and colored Ducttape and we went to town! Skidamirink had an "A" on her's and I had a "P" on mine. Skidamirink wanted stripes and poke-a-dots on hers so I made that happen too.  She wore her sparkle shoes too, because what good super hero doesn't have awesome shoes? :) So JD came along and was an absolute saint. He took care of Skid, and watched all of our stuff (of which there was a lot) and he took the photos for me, and he was just amazing and so helpful. (thanks again JD!) So we got the whole group together for photos before we had to plunge. 

The Westside Wipeouts!

So that is the team. I have to apologize for the photos of us jumping as I forgot to bring my telephoto lens  so JD was forced to deal with the other one, and therefore could not properly zoom in on us.

Plunging!

Making the exit for the hot tubs

Skidamirink also Jumped and I'll share my favorite from that:

My brave girl

This is the exact moment she noticed how cold the water was. She was in for about 2 seconds and she ended up crying. :( However, when she was done she was so proud of herself and so excited! She was even asking when she would be able to do it again! Hooray!  The whole day was a giant success. From frozen water, to hot dogs, free coffee to face painting we had an amazing time. I will definitely be participating again. The plunge was not as bad as I was anticipating and was actually over pretty quickly.  The hot tubes do a great job of warming you up almost instantaneously.

March has brought with it another first! For both skidamirink and me. Skidamirink got her first ride on a 4 wheeler and I learned how to drive one! 

Learning to drive

Skidamirink riding: Notice the ecstatic screaming

Skidamirink had a blast, she did not want to stop riding. I on the other hand was nervous. I enjoyed riding more than driving, but I can see where the excitement lies. I was nervous about damaging the 4 wheeler or making some mistake on it and injuring someone! Luckily my fears proved to be nothing and nothing bad happened to anyone.

The first 13 days of March have been amazing. From house hunting, to celebrating my wonderful sisters 28th birthday at a dueling piano bar, to sledding, plunging in a frozen lake, grilling out and riding on 4 wheelers. We have some fun things planed the rest of the month as well. We are hoping to participate in a parenting class, we are hoping to go shoot archery (but I think that will have to wait until April) and I am having a party for St. Patricks day with the 12:2 girls. I'm looking forward to all of it!

LETS DO THIS! 

2 Down 10 to Go!

Greetings! So this past Sunday I did it! I finally tried Sushi. Not going to lie, I still do not know how I feel about it. Parts were good, others were not. JD became a fan though! Skidamirink tried some cooked and then deep fried shrimp tempura and even liked it! I too was a big fan of that one, I could have eaten those all day! We went to a little restaurant in Stillwater that JD's mother likes, called the shanghai bistro. The place was lovely, great environment and very friendly staff. The staff was also very helpful in helping the newbees order some sushi.

This was our Poo Poo Platter App

Spider Rolls

JD working the chop sticks

California Rolls

My First Taste

Jims First Taste

Pondering...but he loved it

Trying a Shrimp Tempura roll

Pondering...but it was really good

This one? This is that nasty Spider Roll

Basically what I concluded was that, California rolls are mediocre at best. I did not like how sticky they were. Deep friend shrimp tempura is amazing, Shrimp Tempura rolls are tasty, but I'm not sure I could eat more than 3. Spider Rolls are the gross and I never want to eat one again. Overall I had fun and learned some new things. I also tried their egg drop soup because I love egg drop soup but theirs was not so tasty. It has mushrooms and red peppers and tasted weird, so that was a bummer. I'm not crazy about eating the whole shushi roll at once either. I would prefer to cut it in half which I did for some, but then it was a little messy. Surprisingly the seaweed did not bother me at all. It was actually pretty good. JD really liked it, and I think he'll be trying more. As for me? We'll see. I'm not sure I would actively seek it out again, but if it was around I may eat it. 

That being said, today is the 1st of March! AHHHHHH!!! Where in the world did February go?! With March comes preparation for new thing number 3! What is that new thing? Well my friends, it is the Polar Bear Plunge on Lake Calhoun on Saturday March 3rd! I am plunging with a group from my work: The West Side Wipeouts and skidamirink will be participating in the PeeWee plunge! She is super excited to jump in a big pool with ice cubes. We held a fundraiser at work, so know that we will be in costumes, but you will just have to wait for my next post to find out what we will look like! 

Other than than life is amazing. I'm still behind on my reading,but catching up a little more (almost) every day. Today is a "sick day" not for me but for my baby who was up throwing up most of the night. She's passed out on the couch currently giving me time to update! Not a lot is on the adgenda. I have every intention of getting homework done, we'll see how far I get though. I'm feeling a little over whelmed in that area, BUT God is in control and He will get me through all of it! 

We're ready for March over here! Ready for the Polar Plunge, ready to work on my thesis, ready to live life! 

LETS DO THIS!

On a side note, I did add a "follow by email" options for those of you who didn't want to sign up on the site, and I added a "share" tab at the bottom, in case I ever say anything so profound you feel like sharing it with others! Thanks!

Green is a Lovely Color!

Greetings! Sorry I have not written in a while, school over-worked my brain. However, now that I have an approved thesis topic that I am excited about, I can think and breath a little easier!

I have fallen way behind on my reading the Bible in a year! ahh! Good thing I have about 10 months to catch up! I have to read all of Leviticus and stay on top of everything else. It's definitely do-able but I don't want to rush through it either.

Sushi has a tentative date of next Saturday, so here's hoping that happens! It's a little dependent on JD an if he is back from his retreat in time. I did not do a lot of cooking this last week. Like I said, life was overly crazy for some reason. Skid-a-mirink and I have taken to having weekly "picnics" at church as I just can't seem to get dinner together on Wednesdays. I'm trying a slow cooker thing this week though, and I'm hoping that proves much more successful.

So JD is amazing and a saint :) I've been hating my bathroom for about 3 years now. More if you count the time that I was growing up in this house. My parents apparently have never been too into painting, as most of the bedrooms and bathrooms are stark white. I did paint my (now) room Tomato Bisque and A's room is Wild Wisteria, both of which are lovely and very calming. I have left the bathroom alone, because...well....honestly it seemed like too much work! I was talking to JD about it and how I hated it and the whiteness of it washed me out, and gave me a headache, and God love him, he offered to help me fix it! So I asked Daddy if he cared that I messed with his house some more and he basically said go for it. So with the go a head from Dad, JD and I headed off to Lowes.
I already knew that I wanted to paint it some shade of darkerish green. So we headed to the paint, to the Valspar  and settled on a lovely shade of green that is escaping me right now. And of course I do not know where the color thing is at this point in time. (I'm also sick here, so I'm not really sure where anything is as I am in a bit of a fog). So to start with, I emptied out the bathroom.

See, Ugly white. No personality!

Don't mind the tools!

Yep, it's been like this since 1991....

So I was ready to start painting, when JD informed me that I should take the mirror off. I'm no painting/fix-it/remodel expert or even anything to close to it, so to be honest, I was amazed that the mirror just came right off! Of course JD did it for me, it's heavy ya know!

As you can see, we're all taped off as well. So ready, steady paint! We got the first coat on and from the moment the first pit of paint hit the wall, I was sold. I loved it. 

Luckily we did not have to prime it, since it was white, we just washed down the walls with a little water and got to work! We got the first coat done while A was napping so that was nice. We had fun. JD is a great person to work with. Turns out he's great at edging (whereas I am an expert at painting the ceiling and baseboards! yes even with tape) and I'm pretty good at the overall coverage, so together we got it done pretty quick. I boo'd when we read the paining instructions though, as we had to wait 2 hours to put on another coat! So A got up, JD ran to the store (for dinner ingredients) I made dinner, the cheesy taco cornchip thing I made a few posts back, and sopipilla cheesecake. That was more for my buddy Jack's birthday, but it got made nevertheless. 

While I made dinner, JD did the second coat I then put together a new picture frame for the bathroom and reorganized all the stuff. JD was a warrior while we painted, entering to say the least: 

And the finished product!?

And all the people said: Amen! How much better is this?! OK please ignore the blue shade here. This also has been here since 1991 and to be honest I didn't even think of it as I picked the paint color. But IN a few weeks I hope to have that gone and something else in it's place! I love the green, especially with the orange accents.  I added the picture frame, with some flower shots that I have taken, and I think it really adds some life to the room.

I also kept the original artwork that I had in here before. I got the painting in the Ukraine when I was there in 2007. It's a painting of the Opera house and I love it. 

Needless to say, I'm happy. A walked in before we had it all back together and said "oh no Mom! The mirror!" I asked "what about it?" and her response was, " you painted over it!" hahahaha Oh little ones. when she saw it again after the mirror was back, she asked JD how we cleaned it off. haha 

So all that said and done, I have tomorrow off work and I am so excited, especially since I'm sick. A and I will spend some time together then I'm dropping her off at daycare and spending a little time with 2 very lovely girls from 12:2. I'm excited for our thrift store shopping trip! I also need to get started on my research and get some cleaning done. Now that the bathroom is 90% done (JD is going to fix the door so it closes properly, I need a shelf in there and a new shade) I want to start working on something else! But what?? If only it were my own house....If my parents only knew the grand plans I dream up for their house. :)

2012 is shaping up to be an amazing year! I am loving all that has happened for far and cannot wait to see what else it brings! 

LETS DO THIS! 

February is so short it's exciting!

Hello Blogging world! I feel like life is never going to slow down and so I just needed to open up the lappy and start writing before it gets even crazier! I'm going to start on a mini (very mini rant) I HATE HATE Kay Jeweler commercials! Seriously who is that cheesy?! bleh
OK thats over. I've been baking a lot lately. Sopipilla cheesecake, raspberry lemonade bars, flan, and sweet cheese bakklava. All four new to me and 3 of them were delicious. NOT a fan of bakklava. ew. I wont be making that again (and it was hard haha) My favorite was the Flan.

Caramelizing the sugar

Who knew that the above photo could lead to this:

Pretty cool! 

before baking

Ta-da!!

The finished product was AMAZING! OH my, sooooo good and tasty. Jim even liked it. ;) I brought it to an international dessert day at work and everyone loved it. I am so glad that I ventured out and made that one!

And if you're wondering why I hated the Baaklava let me show you:

Do you see you paper thin that crap is?! Who wants to work with that? Not this girl, no thank you. 

Unfortunately I do not have photos of the cheesecake sopipilla but trust me it was amazing. I will be making that again and soon. On the side of projects, Jim helped me with the latest one. I had this terrible blank space on my wall and too many scarves lying around so I decided to put the unused coat rack to use! 

So this is the nasty blank space. Nothing there. At all. So...Jim to the rescue! 

making sure it will hold anything

the finished product

and the handyman

So with Jim's help and my scarves, the wall is no longer bare! So I'm a fan. Of both :) 

I'm still reading the Bible, although I did fall behind a bit so I'm playing some catch up, but I'll get it done. The 12:2 kids have officially kicked off their fundraising for their trip their summer. Superbowl subs and a bake sale (hence all the baking). The kids brought in all kinds of yummy desserts. I am looking forward to working with these kids, they might just keep the fun in my life that I will require to get through this masters program! 

Well to be honest, I'm sleepy and don't want to start babbling. Not sure what the upcoming plans are, but February should prove exciting! 

LETS DO THIS!